‘(Dis)Honesty — The Truth About Lies’ Examines How Falsehoods Sprout

“The reality is,” says Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor, “we all have the potential of being bad.”

It is this provocative idea that runs through the documentary “(Dis)Honesty — The Truth About Lies,” opening on Friday in New York, which Mr. Ariely and two others produced with the filmmaker Yael Melamede.

Through the candid testimony of public figures and regular people — and also relying on expert opinions, behavioral experiments and archival footage — the film explores thorny questions like why people lie, how they do it and what is the fallout. What quickly becomes clear is that the leap from little white lies to insider trading is not that far.

“When you look at what those people did at the end, you say, ‘My goodness, I can’t imagine ever doing something like that,’ ” said Professor Ariely, who specializes in psychology and behavioral economics and who serves as a guide through the film. “But when you look at what they did at the beginning, you say, ‘I can see myself doing that.’ It is a story about a slippery slope.”

Professor Ariely has been immersed in the subject of human behavior as the author of best-selling books like “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.”

Judging by the reactions of critics at screenings, the film has struck a nerve. “Any era is a good one for liars, but folks on every point of the moral or political spectrum are likely to agree: We are living in a fibbers’ renaissance,” Dennis Harvey wrote in Variety. “As Yael Melamede’s documentary notes, various bendings of the truth have among other things recently led us into war, crashed the economy, and allowed potentially catastrophic despoiling of the planet to continue more or less unchecked.”

Indeed, the film was prompted in part by the misdeeds of the mortgage crisis, and it turned out to be all too timely. Two days after it was completed, news broke about the NBC News anchor Brian Williams embellishing a tale about a helicopter journey in Iraq. Then last month, 11 educators were convicted of racketeering and other charges for their roles in Atlanta’s standardized test cheating case.

The film includes interviews with Marilee Jones, the former dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who lied about her academic credentials; Joe Papp, a former professional cyclist who pleaded guilty to distributing performance-enhancing drugs; and Kelley Williams Bolar, an Ohio mother who lied about her home address so her daughters could attend school in a better district.

“We avoided extremes — we didn’t do the Madoffs of the world and stories of incredible poverty,” Ms. Melamede said. “We thought the bigger takeaway is people who are more like us, not psychopathic and not desperate.”

In seeking out interview subjects, the filmmakers found that rather than wanting to conceal their misdeeds, people were eager to confess — even on camera. To some extent, they had nothing to lose. “Most of them had been so shamed publicly,” said Ms. Melamede, a producer of documentaries (including the Academy Award-winning short “Inocente” and the Academy Award-nominated “My Architect”) who is making her directing debut.

But in the cases of the more prominent transgressors, they also wanted to relate their experiences in their own words, because until now the news media had done it for them.

The film also shows Professor Ariely’s research experiments, including one in which subjects were asked to take a math test they could not possibly finish in the allotted time and then score themselves. No fewer than 70 percent exaggerated the results. But when people had to list the Ten Commandments or swear on a Bible — even if they were atheists — beforehand, they reported their scores more honestly.

The process of making the film revealed clear patterns about how people lie, the filmmakers said, namely that people find ways to justify their behavior.

“You can see the process of rationalization across the movie — every story is a story of rationalization,” Professor Ariely said. “There’s the rationalization of doing something for other people, there’s the rationalization that nobody else would suffer, the rationalization that everybody else was doing it.

“We are really good at this,” he added. “If you had to pick a good human skill, rationalization is one of them. We’re so fantastic at it.”

The filmmakers want the movie to have a lasting, consciousness-raising effect, to make people continue to think about their own honesty. As a result, the film is part of a larger “(Dis)Honesty Project” that includes a middle and high school curriculum (the hope is to run a pilot program with two or three schools in the fall); ethics training for corporations; and a “truth box” that invites people to step inside and be recorded on video telling the truth about a lie (it has so far been set up in New York City and Charlottesville, Va.).

Ms. Melamede said that making the film had heightened her own awareness about lying and made her more empathetic with those who go too far.

“But for the grace of something, we could all be in those situations,” she said. “I think I could be so many of these people.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Little Lies We Scatter, and How They Sometimes Sprout . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe